"I want her to have a lovely time for Keltham, even if he's being as cruel as he knows how to be, ideally moreso if he's being as cruel as he knows how to be. Or to learn to fake it but I don't know if we have time for that. If you can train that, then I'll focus on convincing Keltham to try it. - update me, if it's going slowly, and I should slow him down correspondingly."

"There's a small sad saying among slavers, you can't burn clay to iron whatever the heat.  If Meritxell has no innate nature turned to masochism and submission... one might in a week train her to fool a nonexpert, and of course if her user doesn't really care then simple fakery will oft be enough.  To train Meritxell to where she fools Keltham's unknown arts of sexual perception?  I think, over any reasonable amount of time, that simply requires her to start with a convenient amount of potential."

"Or, I suppose, it requires that we are willing to spend a very large amount of gold on turning her into a book and rewriting her.  But we'll be lucky if Absalom has one such scroll for sale at any price, and never mind two of them."

"It may also be that Meritxell is there or nearly there, and that I am hardly needed.  Do you wish me to assess Meritxell for current state and quick trainability in what it is that you wish, and then perhaps the others?"

It wouldn't have occurred to Carissa that it worked like that, rather than some people just having very high standards for who they could actually enjoy giving themselves to, but she isn't the expert, here. "Yes, please. You're aware of my directive to clear all serious punishments with me?"

"I am, though if you mean that to also apply to slave retraining, that further extends my timescales and restricts what I can do at all."

"I am reminded of a thought: if you have not already selected that poor unlucky girl," these words not being spoken in a tone of genuine sympathy, "who is to join you and Pilar in continued punishment, I recommend carrying out the random selection where all can see it, and know that the selected girl is, indeed, unlucky and not disfavored."

"Emergency slave retraining is authorized, whatever it requires; if it makes Meritxell worse at following along in class, I've already discussed with Asmodia feeding all her clever insights to Meritxell so Meritxell can keep being impressive. ....let's gather the girls to introduce you, explain all this, and do the draw. ...if you think I'm competent for that. I think so."

"I agree.  Though the girls are currently in Security processes for training their palace impersonators, and that may have a few more minutes to run."

"Since we took them all aside individually for that, before they had a chance to prepare spells this morning, I expect more than half of them think they're to be killed, as often occurs after one is required to train one's impersonator.  I made a deputy's guess that this decision was not worth waking you for; letting someone be afraid despite your promises of safety, and then showing them that their master spoke truly and will be merciful, is just conventionally good practice when that would occur in the ordinary course of events."

Paxti isn't staring wide-eyed, because Cheliax.  But anybody whose Sense Motive surpasses Paxti's Bluff, which includes everyone else in this room, will be able to tell that surprise is the particular emotion she's holding back.

"I request permission to repeat and rephrase that to make sure I understood it correctly," Paxti says.  (Keltham has made them do that a couple of times.)  She waits for the nod, and then continues.  "My impersonator needs to play the role of me, if after I'd been pulled from Ostenso wizard academy, I'd been transformed into an incredibly deadly Chelish agent, who previously people haven't heard about, because anybody who's seen her is dead."

     "Correct."

"In my first public appearance, 'I' am going to be executing a noble traitor we uncovered a few weeks ago, who's going to cooperatively lose to 'me' in a way that looks like his sorcery just doesn't work against me for unknown reasons - I'd guess if he doesn't play along he gets to die a lot more painfully than that?"

      "Correct on the first part and the second part is none of your concern."

"Is it permitted to ask whether Pilar Pineda was somehow involved in selecting me as the particular person who got this role?"

      "Does that matter to how your impersonator should act?"

"No."

      "Then you don't need to know."

Maybe Paxti is wrong about this, but she's guessing that if Pilar wasn't involved here, they'd have just told her 'you don't need to know' and not asked if it was relevant.

Friendship is un-Asmodean.  Therefore, Pilar did not do this to be friendly.  Pilar obviously expects to be repaid.

Friendship is un-Asmodean.  Pilar did not do this because she is anyone's friend.  Pilar expects to be repaid.

Friendship is un-Asmodean.  Pilar is not the best person in the entire world.  Pilar has some really huge favor in mind.

      "Are you done with that stupid smile?"

"I would be smiling like that if I was actually doing this, and I'm showing it so the impersonator can get it down right."

      "If you're joking -"

"I am not.  Although - where is 'Paxti' on the spectrum of her superiors being permissive?  Spoiled duke's daughter vs. being kept very firmly in line, punished for the slightest trace of unprofessionalism?  That matters a lot for how I'd act in her situation."

      There's some glances among the Security, before, with almost visible reluctance, they inform Paxti that Project Lawful girls do have something of a reputation for being given some amount of disciplinary leeway.

"And this is meant to fool, ideally, people who know me from Ostenso wizard academy, or relatives?"

      The impersonator isn't looking particularly happy about this, which really says something when you have that many ranks in Bluff.

      "It's meant to be as accurate as possible," confirms Security.

"Understood.  In that situation, I think I'd probably start by making the most dramatic entrance I could manage, maybe something with a lot of fire if I could pull that off -"

“As I see it,” Carissa tells her assembled project girls, “the success or failure of every day is measured in the following terms: how many things, even tiny things, did Keltham learn that aren’t true of Taldor, and how much did Keltham discover in himself that Axis can’t offer him. We lose if he ever learns something he isn’t ready to accept. High Priestess Subirachs is here to try to make you valuable enough that Keltham will change his own rules to have you; I’m here to try to keep you from saying things that separate Cheliax from Taldor.

A question you might be considering: what, then, is the role of our lessons? The answer is that only an Evil dath ilani is competent to lie to a Good dath ilani, and so we will have to become them, and that Keltham isn’t going to want girls who can’t keep up with him, so the girls valuable to the project are the ones who can. All of us would have been taken off this project by now, if learning how to think wasn’t totally essential to it, or if it was possible to learn how to think like a dath ilani with anything less than a full time effort. A dath ilani is very nearly priceless to Cheliax. You have the chance to become one. You should be utterly ruthless about arranging to succeed at your lessons; if you think of something that might help, request it. If you think of something that’s getting in the way, we will check if we can be rid of it.

The punishment order I laid out earlier is obviously heretical. It probably won’t work. It has been authorized anyway because it is that important for all of you to master this art: a thousand important things might be set aside, if that makes you faster at learning to think. 

I’m going to do the draw now, for who gets punished normally, so the effects of punishment don’t get mixed up with the effects of believing your superiors are out to get you, or anything like that. Mind, even if you’re selected, you aren’t being unduly punished, you just aren’t being experimentally neglected. Here are slips of paper with all your names."

She demonstrates them, mixes them.

Girls shift anxiously in their seats. Try not to pray, because you're definitely not supposed to pray to be wrongly exempted from punishment.

Asmodia is trying very hard to convince herself that, when she decided to come back, she didn't expect any reprieve like this in the first place, and also, that if she gets singled out for the worst of this, it still won't be a bad thing nearly bad enough to make up for the good thing that happened to her, it won't prove that something else hates her equally as much, maybe she got the help she did because this was going to happen to her, to help her survive it, because if she were fated to be drawn now and hadn't received that help earlier, it certainly would have broken her, which it isn't going to now, right...

Someone, somewhere, Asmodia thinks to herself, and watches Carissa Sevar draw a slip of paper.

"Tonia," says Carissa, trying not to actively sound cheerful about it because then Tonia will want to kill her which will confound her experiment. "As Asmodeus wills it. You're in good company, I got myself in trouble at the palace and spent yesterday in the Queen's company. Now I'm fourth circle.

You're all dismissed to breakfast; the High Priestess will take you aside as convenient for her."

It's not actually reasonable to be upset about what's neutral news, not bad news, but Tonia is to a Chelish person visibly upset.

Apparently her curse thinks she's not supposed to give Tonia a cookie or a hug.

Maybe she'll suggest to Sevar later that there should've been some kind of extra privilege associated with this.  Or is the whole point that they're trying not to be heretical with Tonia?

Breakfast is better than it was yesterday, not as nice yet as it was as the villa, but things are still being set up on the project site.

Keltham isn't here yet.  Pilar and Ione are, if anybody's got Additional Questions for them before Keltham arrives.  Or Asmodia, not that Asmodia seems particularly interesting in any way.

If they treat that girl as special then all they'll learn is that punishment+being treated as special has good effects, which Carissa, based on her own experience, suspects it does, but which is not a scalable training program. 

Breakfast is worse than in the palace, but still quite nice. She sits with the other girls so she can show off her new ability to hang a fourth-circle spell. (Detect Scrying and Rainbow Pattern, Detect Scrying for obvious strategic reasons now that she's famous and Rainbow Pattern because she'd like to stop getting into hand to hand knife fights with attackers.)

She can also answer questions if people have any for her.

Message from Pilar to Sevar:  Suggestion, Tonia goes to the head of food lines and similar, or us if we feel like it.  Good Asmodeans get precedence over heretics even if the heretics are following orders.

Interesting. Concerned then we'll be measuring whether feeling special is good for people not whether punishment is. Maybe worth it for morale.

If feeling special is what it takes, we can take ten people destined to be real dath ilani and put them in class with a hundred others who have to defer to them.

- yeah, fair.

She announces Pilar's food line policy while floating herself a croissant over to where she's seated because at fourth-circle you should really have an Unseen Servant or two live at all times. 

Tonia smiles at Pilar. Slightly suspiciously.

"I'll assign myself a punishment for it later."

Paxti would like to know from Sevar the policy on Paxti being allowed to ask Pilar a lot of questions about topics including how exactly 'Paxti' ended up as an invincible hunter of traitors.

"The most important respect in which everyone at the palace disappoints Asmodeus is that they are constantly gossiping about things they don't need to know. I think we should aspire to disappoint Asmodeus in a slightly more inspiring way than that."

...this does tend to quiet the Additional Questions that might otherwise have been asked of Ione or Pilar.

Message from Pilar to Sevar:  That reminds me, I made a lot of decisions about the image of the fake 'Project Lawful' while you were out of contact yesterday and Rugatonn was out of the palace.  Others seemed to think the project director was supposed to be the one in charge of that policy.  I offer myself for your review and your correction at your convenience.